pdfrum

A composable PDF library built in Rust.

pdfrum is a modern, thread-safe PDF library — modular stages you compose, CPU or GPU backends, no unsafe — tested against PDFium. For a UI, a RAG pipeline, or any app that has to open a file. JavaScript is off by default (javascript feature). No XFA, no viewer.

pdfrum = "0.1"

use pdfrum::{Document, RenderOptions, VelloCpuBackend};

let doc = Document::open(concat!(
    env!("CARGO_MANIFEST_DIR"),
    "/tests/fixtures/hello_world.pdf"
))?;
for page in doc.pages() {
    let pixmap = page.render(&VelloCpuBackend::new(), &RenderOptions::scaled(2.0))?;
    let text = page.text().to_string();
    assert_eq!((pixmap.width(), pixmap.height()), (400, 400));
    assert!(text.contains("Hello, world!"));
}
# Ok::<(), pdfrum::Error>(())

A PDF file

A PDF is a random-access file of objects (ISO 32000-1). %PDF-m.n names the version. The body is objects. The cross-reference table at the end says where each object lives; the trailer points at the table and at the catalog. [Document::open] reads the bytes, recovers that table (or rebuilds it), and leaves objects unparsed until something asks.

An object is null, boolean, integer, real, string, name, array or dictionary, plus a stream (a dictionary with bytes) and an indirect reference (12 0 R). A page is a dictionary in a tree: /MediaBox and /CropBox in points (1/72 inch, origin bottom-left, y-up), /Resources (fonts, images, colour spaces), and /Contents — a stream of painting operators. A form is an /AcroForm plus widget annotations on those pages.

A render interprets the operators into a page-object graph, then a [RasterBackend] paints it. Text extraction walks the same graph and never rasterizes. Damage the file survives is [Document::diagnostics], not an Err.

This crate is the API — [Document], [Page], [TextPage], [Form]. The rest of the workspace is public; [Document::parser], [Page::objects], [PageEdit::graph] and [Annotation::dict] reach it.

Where to start

Features

default-features = false is a parser and extractor. A render always names its backend.

License

MIT OR Apache-2.0. Crate map, changelog, and conformance numbers: github.com/PoHsuanLai/pdfrum.